Founded in 2003, Armchair Arcade is the award-winning Website of author Bill Loguidice and a team of leading authorities on videogame, computer, and technology history and lifestyle. Their ongoing mission is to explore the complete history of videogames, computers, and technology in an intelligent, thought-provoking manner.

Note that this version of the site is no longer active and is only here for historical reference. To visit the new version of the site, go to http://www.armchairarcade.com. See you there!

Dug out the old Amiga 1200 and hooked it up for a bit of demo watching and gaming. I have a PCMCIA compact flash adapter installed as well as a compact flash IDE interface booting into a very nice setup of Workbench and WHDLoader that allows me to run a plethora of games and demos. Here I load up one of my favourite demos created by Fairlight, quite a prolific demo-group on the various systems that can be found within the Commodore range of home computers.

This recording is done from the composite video signal. A nicer RGB signal can be taken from the Amiga but I was not able to hook that up properly for the recording of this video.

Demos really show what machines are capable of and the sounds and visuals often are quite artistic and can sometimes compete with the creations of serious graphic design students/professionals.

To this day, demos are being created on various computers and consoles often containing the various elements seen in this wonderful example. Having grown up with these home computer systems and coding myself it is fun to see how the various programmers 'evolved' and learned new techniques often typically absorbed during college computer science and math classes, resulting in even better demos.

Enjoy! And Kudos to the people from Fairlight for making this wonderful demo. I've been enjoying it a long time and will continue to do so for a long time!

I got a nice cobalt blue version of the GameMID to test out a new firmware that enables the device to store and install applications onto the SD card as if it was the internal memory. It's best to use class 10 SD cards for it though. This makes it possible to install quite a few large games on the unit that would not have fit in the standard 8Gb internal memory the unit comes with. Very nice that a company itself is doing these software improvements so that no third party software is needed.

I also obtained an Archos Gamepad 2 and I want to put it through its paces as well. I want to see which of the two comes out tops. Hardware-wise the Archos Gamepad 2 should be faster, but is it?

The video also includes a little sample of the Archos Gamepad 2 vs GameMID video I am working on. If you have any suggestions for the video, please leave a comment below and I'll see if I can stick it in.

I believe Bill Loguidice also received a review copy of the GameMID and am curious of his findings.

The poster for the upcoming Gameplay: The Story of the Videogame Revolution documentary film is now ready, and shown below. Click the image for access to the full-sized version, or check out the attached PDF. When the Website is ready, I'll post again, and also once distribution details for this year are finalized. The film, which is based on the Vintage Games series of books by me and Matt Barton (we're also writers and producers on the film), covers the history of videogames from the perspective of those who made it happen. Those interviewed include Nolan Bushnell, John Romero, Todd Howard, Daniel Murray, Darion Lowenstein, Eric Lindstrom, David Crane, and many, many more. The narrator is Cain Devore. The film also has a Facebook and Google+ presence, although Armchair Arcade is still a great place to find out new details.

I was interviewed for a computer collecting feature for The Wall Street Journal several months back, and the piece finally hit both the newspaper and online today. While neither of my two contributed photos made it in (which I've included below) due in part to a slight change in direction of the piece, several of my quotes still made it in. While I wish the piece was a bit longer (as I thought originally planned), I'm still heartened by the positive coverage this segment of our industry has gotten in a quality publication. Check it out online here. Photos below:

Episode 11 of Randy Kindig's Floppy Days Vintage Computing Podcast, entitled, VCF East 9.1 Preview w/Evan Koblentz, and celebrating the one year anniversary of the show, is now out. You can read more about VCF East 9.1 here, which runs from April 4 - 6, 2014, in Wall Township, New Jersey. I'll be trying to attend that and CoCoFest this year, which runs from April 26 - 27, in Lombard, Illinois. VCF East is a general show covering everything from classic personal computers to mainframes, while CoCoFest is targeted to fans of Tandy's Radio Shack Color Computer series.

Auto Modellista - 'collecting cars' was released on the Xbox, GameCube and PS2, and it had a very distinct cell-shaded art style. It was produced by Capcom in 2002. It was positioned as the ultimate car tuning/tweaking game but wasn't the success Capcom hoped it would be. Still it is quite a nice arcade style racer and I opt not to dabble too much in the various configuration options of the various cars. It's a bit reminiscent of Daytona USA in the way the cars handle actually.

The US release was enhanced and had more US cars and the drive mechanics were altered a bit. You can find it as Auto Modellista: US Tuned. Now that would be worth checking out and comparing with the Japanese and the PAL releases.

In this video I show you what the game looks like. It is not a full review nor is it a playthrough.

In this video I hooked up my PS2 Slim up to the AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable through component cables and setting the video out settings to component. This results in quite a nice SD grab.

The color ebook (Kindle) version of our latest book, CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy's Underdog Computer, is now available on Amazon.com alongside the standard paperback. We're delighted to have received 17 out of 17 five star reviews on Amazon, and look forward to the upcoming media reviews on various podcasts, magazines, and Websites (we're also scheduled for a few interviews). More updates to follow as they happen. Thanks for the support!

Classic comic strip Wizard of Id was no stranger to classic videogame and computer owners, with both Wizard of Id's WizType and Wizard of Id's WizMath receiving releases on the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and PC DOS computers for the former, and the ColecoVision console and Commodore 64 computer for the latter. Both titles were published in 1984 by Sierra On-Line, which also happened to publish two titles related to sister comic, B.C., in both 1983 and 1984 (B.C. was also used in a series of print advertisements for the failed Timex Sinclair 2068 computer). Similarly, Sierra released the breakthrough adventure game title for IBM's failed PCjr computer, King's Quest, in 1984, which was eventually followed up with releases on more popular platforms over the years. Current Wizard of Id comic strip caretaker, Jeff Parker, did a wonderful homage tying all that I described together on Sunday, January 12, 2014. Enjoy:Wizard of Id does King's Quest and Sierra